1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to devices and manufacture methods of electronic devices formed on the semiconductor substrate. More particularly, this invention relates to improved devices and manufacture methods to recycle the photochemical materials used in the manufacturing processes for reducing the material costs and also to minimize the environmental impacts of the manufacturing processes.
2. Description of the Relevant Art
The conventional methods and configurations for manufacturing electronic devices on semiconductor substrate are still limited by wastes of photochemical materials due to the lack of devices and processes to capture and recycle the photochemical materials as part of the manufacturing processes. Specifically, FIG. 1 shows a conventional configuration 11 to manufacturing an electronic device on a semiconductor substrate by coating a semiconductor chip with a photoresist layer followed by applying the lithographic processes to manufacture the electronic device on the semiconductor chip. As shown in FIG. 1, the device 11 includes a standard coating chamber 10, a coating platform 55 supported and rotated by a shaft 35 and a drive mechanism 60 located inside the coating chamber 10. The device 11 also includes a drain system 30 disposed at the bottom of the coating chamber 10 and a dispense nozzle 50 located at the top of the coating chamber 10 for dispensing the coating material, for example photochemical materials, on the wafer in the coating process. In the coating process, a wafer 20 is placed on a coating platform 55; hence the dispense nozzle 50 is moved to the center of the wafer 20 and deposits the coating material, for example the photoressist, on the wafer while a drive mechanism 60 supports and rotates the coating platform 55 with the wafer 20. As such, the coating material is uniformly coated on the top surface of the wafer. The residual coating material spun off from the wafer 20 is drained out at the drain system 30. In the conventional coating process, more than 99% of the coating material is wasted since the coating material is not separately collected and recycled and is just drained as wastes. The waste of the photochemical materials incurs not only the cost of the material, but also cost of collection and treatment thus causes potential hazardous environmental impacts.
Therefore, a need still exists to provide new device configurations and manufacture methods for applying the photochemical materials for manufacturing the electronic devices on a semiconductor substrate such that the above discussed problems and limitations can be resolved.